The Modjeska Simkins School is preparing for its spring session, which begins March 1 and runs through June.
To help celebrate our 10th year, we wanted share what the school has meant to some of the students who completed the program.
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Josh Dunn, 2024 graduate
As a graduate from the most recent session of the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights, I wanted to write a statement of appreciation for what Modjeska School has meant for me. Throughout the 14-week class, Dr. Robert Greene II and the many guest lecturers clarified what I had always felt as a South Carolinian but never knew how to articulate: this state has nearly always played an outsized role in the nation’s greatest injustices, but, just as consistently, it has been home to individuals and movements willing to take great personal risks for justice and human rights.
Week after week, the Modjeska School provided me with a usable history. I was able to take practical lessons from the lives of people like Septima Clarke, Modjeska Simkins, and Capt. Howard Levy.
I saw more clearly how the problems we are facing today are rooted in South Carolina’s legacy of empire, enslavement, apartheid, class warfare and suppression of dissent.
I developed an analysis that helped me see how transforming South Carolina is transforming the world. And I found a community of shared values in my cohort, many of whom were already seasoned organizers.
All of this lit a fire. My excuses for sitting out didn’t feel very palatable anymore. I wanted to put my principles into action and join in the legacy of all of those that came before me. Drawing on what I learned through the school, I started seeing organizing not as a discrete act but as something to weave into the fabric of my life, finding ways to lend my skills and knowledge where I could.
Of course, it’s all still a work-in-progress, but I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish with the help of a lot of new friends and co-conspirators. The more I step into organizing, the more I see how much more I have to learn. But the Modjeska School prepared me for this with a foundational history and the courage to join the long project of justice in South Carolina. So for that, I am very thankful.
